[rt-users] Approach for RT spam handling?

Dan Foster rt at evilphb.org
Sat Aug 14 23:00:20 EDT 2004


We use RT 3.2.1; looks sharp, and have been using RT since the 1.0 days.

Our users (internal and external) uses email to open RT tickets, and
appropriate personnel then works them via the web interface. Works out
great since the organization is pretty well geographically dispersed.

Since we deal with external customers, we get spam - usually due to
trojans scanning their address books and so forth. Nothing new there.

We run all inbound messages through a spam filter which is *extremely*
effective (prior to delivery to RT), but will never be 100% perfect so
some spam still slips through.

So we need to be able to select multiple tickets at once (the spam
stuff) and then mark them as being resolved (and preferrably,
auto-adding a generic explanation, like 'spam; closing as resolved.')
WITHOUT sending the usual resolved ticket reply to the spammer.

Any ideas or thoughts on how this might be best implemented?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the existing bulk ticket update
facilities since it meshes in well with the existing RT interface.

But how do I tell RT that the selected tickets (via bulk ticket update
screen) is spam and how to handle their resolution?

I was originally thinking of setting a custom field called 'MarkedSpam'
with a value of 'IsSpam' if set... and then modifying the global scrip
for On Resolve to check to see if this is enabled. If marked as spam,
don't send a reply to the requestor. And also modify or add another
scrip to set ticket(s) to resolved.

But what puts an hole in that approach is there is no facility in the
bulk ticket update screen to mark a message as being spam.

The ultimate goal is to have an interface where the person working a RT
queue just selects a bunch of tickets, clicks on something to mark as
spam, and RT then closes these tickets without sending mail. That would
really save a lot of time when dealing with high traffic queues.

It would also offer us a way to skip tickets when doing the next bulk
export and save significant space and processing time on the import.

Also, I'm reluctant to customize the global scrips provided with RT
because I fear they could be overwritten by future RT upgrades... yet, I
don't see a good way for an add-on scrip to conditionally suppress or
modify an existing global scrip's behavior in certain situations.

If you were in my shoes, how would you approach a need to mark multiple
tickets as spam and resolve them without mail sent to the requestor...
thoughts?

-Dan



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